Indiana HIV outbreak, hepatitis C epidemic sparks US alert

April 24, 2015 byJeni O'malley

Federal health officials helping to contain an HIV outbreak in Indiana state issued an alert to health departments across the U.S. on Friday, urging them to take steps to identify and track HIV and hepatitis C cases in an effort to prevent similar outbreaks elsewhere.

A country in this Midwestern state is experiencing nearly daily increases in new HIV infections tied to intravenous drug use, and health officials hope the situation prompts other states to closely track their hepatitis C and HIV rates to identify potential clusters of disease.

Indiana state health officials said Friday that the number of positive HIV tests has jumped to 142 in 2015 in Scott County. That number includes 136 confirmed cases and 6 preliminary positives.

The county saw just three new HIV cases between 2009 and 2013.

Dr. Joan Duwve, chief medical consultant for the Indiana State Department of Health, said four out of five people infected in the outbreak have acknowledged using injectable drugs, mostly the painkiller Opana.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a federal agency, recorded a 150 percent increase in acute hepatitis C cases from 2010 to 2013, said Dr. Jonathan Mermin, director of the National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD and TB Prevention. Health officials say high rates of hepatitis C are a key indicator of needle-sharing and a potential HIV outbreak.

Indiana typically sees about 500 new HIV cases a year, health officials have said. The Scott County outbreak is just the "tip of the iceberg" of a national opiate abuse problem that puts people at high risk of infectious diseases, Mermin said.

Dr. Jerome Adams, the state's health commissioner, said the state has spent more than $2 million on efforts to fight the outbreak, which include testing, awareness campaigns, a limited needle-exchange program and an outreach center that allows people to sign up for health insurance and other services.

Cases of HIV have skyrocketed among injection drug users in a rural community in the midwestern state of Indiana where 142 people have been diagnosed since the beginning of the year, officials said Friday.

Indiana's governor authorized a short-term needle-exchange program and other steps Thursday to help contain the spread of HIV in a county tied to 79 new infections since January, all of them linked to intravenous drug use.

Recommended for you

For more than 20 years, scientists at Scripps Research have chipped away at the challenges of designing an HIV vaccine. Now new research, published in Immunity, shows that their experimental vaccine strategy works in non-human ...

HIV evades the body's immune defenses through a multitude of mutations, and antibodies produced by the host's immune system to fight HIV also follow convoluted evolutionary pathways that have been challenging to track.

A new study suggests that a genetic switch that causes latent HIV inside cells to begin to replicate can be manipulated to completely eradicate the virus from the human body. Cells harboring latent HIV are "invisible" to ...

AIDS patients suffer higher rates of cancer because they have fewer T-cells in their bodies to fight disease. But new research examines why HIV-infected patients have higher rates of cancer—among the leading causes of death ...

Of the 40 million people around the world infected with HIV, less than one per cent have immune systems strong enough to suppress the virus for extended periods of time. These special immune systems are known as "elite controllers." ...

Researchers at Johns Hopkins have identified two patients with HIV whose immune cells behave differently than others with the virus and actually appear to help control viral load even years after infection. Moreover, both ...

0 comments

Please sign in to add a comment.
Registration is free, and takes less than a minute.
Read more

Click here to reset your password.
Sign in to get notified via email when new comments are made.